MEMORY LANE IS OPEN
by later2nite
Summary: Brian and Justin reflect back on their relationship through the years from 15 years into the future after 513
1. Chapter 1

MEMORY LANE IS OPEN - CHAPTER ONE

He worshipped me. He stalked me. About a week after we'd met, he told me that he needed me.

I caressed his velvety cheek and ridiculed the crock of shit he'd been taught to think, all the while nearly drowning in those innocent pools of blue. I could have easily given in right then and there, yet I'd been strong and held my ground, seeing fit to cling to my tried-and-true credo of 'I don't believe in love.'

Besides, who would have claimed first prize in the How Many Times Can You Bitterly Disappoint Justin Taylor In One Lifetime grand sweepstakes if I'd given in so hastily? Exactly. So, in the long run, I guess you could say it all worked out.

Our first year was certainly fraught with turmoil, mainly my own at trying to make sense of my life's philosophy and fighting tooth and nail to continue my merry way down its path. The fact that I'd staunchly adhered to it for twenty-nine years meant absolutely nothing to My Better Half, whose purpose for existence, it seems as I look back on it, was to stymie my progress come hell or high water. I mean, have you seen his ass?

But I digress.

"Where're you headed?" I can still hear myself ask as if it were yesterday, stumbling out of Babylon and spying his unfamiliar form against that lamppost across the street. Something about the way his gaze met mine should have signaled trouble for this former fuck 'em and run king, but I'd found my conquest for the night, and he was hot!

"No place special," he'd nonchalantly shrugged, his mouth just begging to be kissed.

He'd set me up so beautifully. I pressed my lips together and raised an eyebrow. "I can change that," tumbled out unchecked, a hint of a smile playing around the corners of my eyes at the thought of how easy it was going to be.

But taking his virginity? Letting him name my kid? Openly carrying on with crazy possessive antics to win him back from two would-be tricks who'd suddenly found him more fascinating than me? Mighty significant incidents had gone down within 72 hours of that initial glance, and mixed together with his starry-eyed dreams, I should have known I was stirring a recipe for a dish I'd been avoiding my entire life.

He'd seen something in me worth his while even as I'd seen nothing there, fighting for me with steely determination until he had me right where he wanted me. Impressive, you say? Hell, yes! It was, especially considering what a stubborn fool I used to be. You see, before we'd made it too far into that first year, it dawned on this devoted disciple that the only way for my well-reasoned creed to hold any weight at all was to keep him at bay.

Sometimes, I succeeded. It's a goddamned mystery why he didn't throw in the towel and give up on my sorry ass. God knows I'd heaped scores of opportunities onto him to do just that. (Yes, I've since apologized many times over for my sucky behavior.) Miraculously, though, he always came back for more. I believe I've mentioned his starry-eyed dreams.

At other times, I failed miserably to keep him at bay, what with his mission statement consisting of, "Fuck me harder!"

And then there were all the times it ended in a draw: I succeeded, yet Justin could sense I didn't want to.

Take, for instance, the afternoon I popped into Lindsey and Melanie's with a little toy for Gus. "What's he doing here?" I quickly asked as I glimpsed Justin on the floor of their living room, almost positive a collective conspiracy was somehow afoot.

Lindsey sported a devious smile. "We ran into him on the street."

"It was like this weird coincidence," Justin added, not looking up. He sat there, continuing to sketch Lindsey and the sleeping infant cradled in her arms, without as much as a nod in my direction.

"I'll bet," I snarked, sarcasm seeming to be my middle name back then. Playfully smacking the back of his head as I walked behind him, I made my way toward the chair in the corner that doubled as a stuffed animal receptacle. I still wonder, to this day, if any of them caught the spring in my step when I covertly detected the huge grin spreading across his face.

"This is really good," Lindsey raved as Justin held up the finished, poignantly accurate pencil drawing of mother and child. "For someone your age, you have an amazing feel for the human form."

"I've noticed that, myself," I remarked casually, retrieving an animal from under my leg. I tossed it Justin's way and watched it collide with the side of his face because I was tired of being neglected, but the kid had willpower and (as he admitted to me years later) an agenda.

"I was onto you," he'd said with a twinkle in his eye and a kiss on his lips just for me. "You always had to be in control."

We were celebrating our tenth anniversary so I let that one go. It might have had something to do with the way he rapidly tacked on what a tough time he'd had ignoring me. And his overwhelming urge to run to me.

"You know, there's going to be an art show at the GLC," Lindsey kept up the conversation that day at her house.

"What's that?" Justin wondered. He'd only been out a few months; there was so much he'd needed to learn.

"The Gay and Lesbian Center," I croaked sardonically. "A safe haven for fags who can't get laid." I think that was the very moment I'd decided to appoint myself his personal tutor for the sole objective of molding him into the best homosexual he could possibly be - my little project. It was perfect. I could go on fucking him silly and enjoying my idol status in his eyes, all under the guise of homosexual guru.

"Twist reality much?" I should have been asking myself, but I was too busy teaching him how to give the ultimate blow job. Hey, I still view the personal tutor route as the most brilliant win-win ever to be devised.

"Would you like to have your work in the show?" Lindsey asked Justin.

"That would be intense," he replied, all the idealism and zeal you'd expect from a budding seventeen-year-old artist bubbling from his pores.

"Good," I threw in from the animal chair. "Give him something to do besides stalking me." A teddy bear flew through the air, landing squarely on my target.

This time he reacted. "Don't flatter yourself!" Laughing, he lobbed it into a high arc right back at me, his eyes alive with infatuation and mine eating it up.

Lindsey told me later I was beaming in spite of myself, and that it was the first time she'd noticed something different about me.

Gotta love those draws!


	2. Chapter 2

MEMORY LANE IS OPEN - CHAPTER TWO

"Didn't you have Art Club this afternoon?" my mom asked, shocked to see me home in the middle of the day.

"I quit Art Club."

"You love Art Club. Just last week-"

"You don't know everything about me!" I snapped, interrupting her parental speech before she'd gotten too far into it. "A week's like a long time. Things can change in a week." I can meet the hottest guy on the planet and lose my virginity in a week, my mind kept going.

Falling in love with Brian at first sight had been positively dizzying, crowding out my previous time wasters in the blink of an eye. I willingly let my art take a back seat in response to all the changes going on in my seventeen-year-old world, my new priorities in life taking over with surprising maturity. I was merely a senior in high school, yet I can truthfully report, all these years later, that my 'managing' of Brian had begun then.

Always available, always engaging, I chipped away at the the walls surrounding him with a minimum of fanfare, uncovering fairly early on the true culprit for most of his lecherous behavior. It was simple, really. Intrinsically feeling unworthy of being loved, compliments of his flagrantly dysfunctional family, Brian's existence had always been about his long-term friendship with Michael, his ultra-successful professional career (with its attendant making of money hand over fist), and his personal favorite: the never ending pursuit of fresh meat.

While his insatiable thirst for any decent-looking specimen he hadn't yet conquered was non-negotiable, I learned in those first few weeks that it was also meaningless - amounting to little more than feeding a beast of an addiction to fun. Not presuming that I could fix anything, understanding made it easy to wait for him to come back around after every little junket to Fun Town.

I'd assimilated with ease into Brian's inner circle of friends, all of them immediately getting how hopelessly in love with him I was. They stood by and watched as I slowly and systematically melted his heart, Brian kicking and screaming, of course, every step of the way. (It's so unfair when maintaining your stud status has to compete with finding out what it means to truly care for one person.) 'He fights off love,' I'd awakened to the great epiphany one morning. It made me want to give it to him all the more.

I knew I was making headway when Brian took me under his wing, looking out for me and keeping my best interests at heart. He always tried to be such a grown-up, but it was kind of amusing to watch him lose the constant battle he waged to resist me. The evening I strode into Woody's and stuck my chest out in his face as he lined up his next shot on the pool table was particularly entertaining. I asked him to guess what I'd gotten that day.

"A new bell for your bicycle?" He sank his shot like a pro and searched for the next one, carefully avoiding eye contact with me.

"A nipple ring!" I corrected him with pride.

"What makes you think I'd be even remotely interested that you have a ring through your tit?" His eyes never left the felt.

Turned out, he was actually more than a little remotely interested, sweeping me out of Woody's and back to his loft in record time. He entered me with a passionate cry as I crouched under him, gold nipple ring and all. I remember rhythmically grasping and releasing handfuls of slate blue sheets, my knees becoming calloused with the friction.

My heart sang when his long, slender fingers fell between mine.

. . .

The second time my art almost became a casualty of circumstance was when my mother informed me that her marriage had irretrievably broken down, and that she and my dad were divorcing. I'd gone home to tell her that instead of Dartmouth, where my dad was expecting me to attend college, I was going to enroll at the Pittsburgh Institute of Fine Art.

"They had over two thousand applications, seventy openings, and I got in!" My Nikes hadn't touched the ground since early that morning, Debbie quickly scanning the acceptance letter and giving me the good news.

My buoyant mood crashed and burned with a dull thud, however, as my mom dropped the bomb at the end of my visit. Suddenly, my confident, independent decision of what to do with my life had become a whole lot less cut-and-dried.

Debbie found the evidence of its complete abandonment in her trash can the next day.

"All of it...his sketchbooks...his pencils...everything. I found them in the trash this morning," I heard her telling Brian on the phone. If anyone could right the derailed train, in her eyes, it would be him. "Try to follow me here, Brian," she went on. "It was no accident. He told me himself that he feels responsible for his parents breaking up. Making himself happy is no longer important."

My mind wandered during every class that day. My father had never accepted my choices. Being forbidden to see Brian was the reason we no longer resided under the same roof. I blamed myself for the undoing of my mother's marriage, abruptly deciding to head off to Dartmouth to make amends. 'A closetful of suits and ties,' I'd agonized. 'Secretaries...business lunches...how will I ever make it through the next forty years?'

. . .

"Jesus!" I shrieked later that night. "Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?"

Babylon's bartender had no intention of serving my irascible, fake I.D.-holding self.

"Me," Brian intervened, stepping up to the bar just before things got ugly. "Two beers," he ordered. "I'M THIRSTY!" he vowed when it looked like trouble.

Friday evening. Crippled destiny. Brian told me years later that he could have found his way to me by Braille. He let me have one of his Heinekens, along with a chaser of sage advice, neatly delivered in his trademark no-nonsense approach.

"Here's to your bright, shining future as Pittsburgh's new Andy Carnegie," he started, handing me the hard-won libation.

"I'll drink to that." I tipped the distinctive green bottle and poured its contents down my throat.

"Only, I thought you were going to be the next Andy Warhol." Brian's eyes pinpointed mine. They seemed to want something from me.

"I changed my mind." I drank more beer, knowing that wasn't what he wanted.

"And after all the trouble I went through to make you the best homosexual I could? I can't believe you'd blow it. And with the flimsiest excuse: 'I've caused my parents enough pain.' How can you even stand there and look me in the eye?"

Nope. Not what he wanted at all.

"It's true," I said. "I've caused them so much pain."

Brian was relentless. "They cause their own pain, just like everybody else. And now you're going to give up everything you want just to make them happy?"

"Shut up, Brian!" I tried to end the onslaught. "You don't know anything!"

He wasn't nearly finished. "I know it's scarier finding your own way than doing what's expected," he roundly arrived at the crux of the matter.

"I'm not scared." I peered into my empty beer bottle.

"You're terrified," Brian announced, "just like the night you met me. I was sure you'd run back home. But you didn't. And look what happened."

The past few months fast-forwarded across the canvas of my mind. I gazed upward into Brian's eyes, much the same as I'd done on that first night under the lamppost, markedly minus the heaping helping of trepidation. "I turned into a big queer."

His eyes and face oozed approval. The key to decoding Brian always lies in his eyes and face. "Yeah, lucky for you," he crooned, reaching his arm out toward me. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be wasting my time." He pulled me by the front of my shirt with him onto the dance floor.

I thought I was over the butterflies in the stomach phase. Evidently, not.

"But, it's too late now," Brian affirmed, a slight smile on his lips. "There's no turning back." He took my face in his hands. He seemed to have gotten what it was he'd wanted.

The kiss was soft and understated; I knew it wouldn't end like that. I pondered my future. And my homosexuality. Was it a choice I could have avoided?

Not while Brian was kissing me.


End file.
